


The Days Get Longer and the Nights Smell Green

by mageofmind (renegadeartist)



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Dissociation, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Spoilers for volume 7, Suicidal Thoughts, post volume 7 episode 8 Cordially Invited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:22:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23417413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegadeartist/pseuds/mageofmind
Summary: Whitley meets one of Weiss's friends. He is, in a word, strange.
Relationships: Oscar Pine & Whitley Schnee, Oscar Pine/Whitley Schnee
Comments: 7
Kudos: 152





	The Days Get Longer and the Nights Smell Green

**Author's Note:**

> I keep seeing posts about this ship/interaction, so I thought about it a bit and wrote something. I might continue it once the next volume comes out and we know more about what happens. We'll see. Any inaccuracies are because I haven't rewatched the episode in a while. Title is from The World at Large by Modest Mouse.
> 
> Let me know if I should add more content warnings.

The sickly sweet, cloying scent of the wine makes him gag, a motion that lurches up from his stomach, through his throat, and exits his mouth in a hacking cough. His ruined waistcoat is thrown to the sparkling floor, wine leaking out in pools of blood red. He falls against the wall and pulls his shoes off, throwing them violently away from himself. His hair is pasted against his forehead, and he can barely muster the energy to stand up properly again. 

He turns the faucet on. Throws the ice cold water up towards his face. The droplets make everything that much wetter, but it is cleansing, in a way. The pure, clean absence of smell, the lack of burning in the back of his throat. Cold, but not solid yet. It slips through the drain, threaded pink like he’s been washing a wound.

He wants to sit there, in silence, watching the water spiral away. He wants to follow it. Collapse into himself, fold all the delicate, sharp edges against the other side, smaller and smaller until there’s not much at all, just a tightly packed mass of misery. Something to be washed away into the ocean, able to sleep beneath the crushing waves. Those sharp edges caressed and smoothed until they become nothing at all, until his memory and identity is gone. 

His hair smells like his mother’s breath, when she was weak and sobbing against a wall, glass spilling the foul smelling liquid into the carpet. He wasn’t supposed to care about things like that, but he set the bottle upright before he attempted to lift his mother up and guide her to bed. She’d mumble about cameras and security and the way Jacques had grabbed her arm just a little too tightly, look, Whitley, it’s bruised, that’s not normal, don’t let anyone treat you like that, don’t ever have kids, don’t bring them into this world, don’t make them endure that. He tucked her into bed, and she’d tried to hold on to his arm, just that little bit too tightly. 

“Don’t ever trust anyone,” she had slurred. “Never enough to love them.” 

He’d gone back to the hallway and cleaned up the bottle, corked up and put away in the dusty corner of his expansive wardrobe filled with nothing but what his father had deemed appropriate. Walls of white, grey, pale blue burial shrouds. 

He feels that hollow, aching hole in his chest again. He stuffs it full of the pain that follows beating his fist against the wall. He is red now, that perfect white stained but not deep enough to hide blood. Besides that, it would sting. Staying locked away long enough will mean enough time to package everything in neat little boxes, put them somewhere unimportant and forgotten. Put himself towards the back, so whatever he needs to do will happen. Whoever he needs to be, for his father, for his mother, for the company, will be there. 

The door opens. 

Whitley feels something like dull, grey fear rise up as he looks, wide eyed, at who it is. 

He’s a boy. Delicate hazel eyes take in the sight of him, and Whitely has the horrible urge to lurch forward and tear the eyes out of the boy’s face. There’s no sense in his head, in the few moments when neither of them speak, but there’s recognition. 

“Sorry,” the boy finally croaks out. “I thought it was— I mean, I didn’t know you were in here.”

Stupid. Forgot to lock the door. But here he is now, this strange, scrawny boy, who wears an already fraying coat that swallows him. He’s uncomfortable, in all of this. In the splendor, the noise. _Poor,_ snears the part of his mind that speaks in his father’s voice. _Hunter,_ says another, nonsensically. He’s no older than Whitley is, he couldn’t be a hunter. 

“Well then get,” Whitely says, tries to draw some pleasure from the way he spits the words, like he’s sure his father does. “ _Out._ ”

He doesn’t. Whitley doesn’t understand. 

“Are you alright?” he asks instead. He moves forward, and Whitley moves back. It doesn’t make sense. He’s dripping wine, one ruby tear after another, and there’s no decorum to recover, no dignity left. If this boy was at the party he saw, he knew. 

“I’m fine,” Whitley says. He’s drawn up straight, back a perfect line like he was taught. Act taller even if you aren’t. He’s not. The other boy has only an inch on him but it feels, in some strange and abstract way, like he’s towering over him. Trapped like a desperate animal. 

The boy frowns, softly. He reaches out a gloved hand, slowly. Like he’s trying to calm down a feral cat. Patronizing, Whitley thinks. “I don’t think you are. Do you need help? You kind of look… well, soaked.”

 _He thinks he’s better than you_ , his father whispers. Whitley wants to be angry. He says, “You look ragged.”

The boy stops. Blinks curiously, not quite offended. Whitely can’t find the clever quips, the harsh words. “I’m Oscar. You’re Whitley, right? Weiss’s brother?” 

Whitley grinds his teeth, the feel of it briefly eclipsing his focus on the boy. Oscar. There, then, is that small, dying ember of rage. He’s one of Weiss’s. Part of her entourage. Her friends. 

It’s the age old bitterness, something he’s kept inside of him for so long. The jealous, raging child who saw his sisters, one after the other, step out of the house, away from him. Neither one of them had ever looked at him sadly, mournfully, like they had at each other. There was only ever the thinly veiled fear, the anger, all of it hidden behind the fragile glass of decorum. They had been polite to him when they had to be and nothing more. But they each have someone. Weiss has so many someones. A team to call her own. That entourage at the door, a rainbow of clothes, a myriad of traumas, leaning against each other, keeping each other standing. 

There’s pain in his chest at the thought of them. He so desperately wants to be angry. He scowls, draws his face into a careful mask. Disdainful. 

“Whitley Schnee. Soon to be heir of the Schnee Dust Company. I don’t recall inviting you, farm boy.” Arms crossed, he waves Oscar away, looking down his nose at him. “Run along, I’m sure you’ve got some animals to feed.” 

Oscar stares. There is not a flicker of hurt in his face. Whitley feels the knife in his chest drive deeper. “You don’t have to do that, you know."

Whitley’s teeth clench painfully, a migraine building. “Now what, pray tell, are you talking about?” He tries for flippant. It comes off more as desperate. 

He keeps staring. Whitley feels the edges of his high quality clothes rub against his skin. He wants to scratch viciously at his arms, his legs, his face. He avoids doing so by turning his back on the boy and pretending to wash his hands again. The water is hot, but his reddening skin is only barely visible under the wine stains. 

“I don’t know you,” Oscar says, finally. “Not really. And you don’t know me, but you hate me anyways. That’s ok. But you’re hurting, and lonely. The anger, the pain, everything bad wound tight enough to burn, those things fester, and they stay with you if you don’t try to get them out. Find someone to talk to, some lifeline to hold on to.” Whitley realizes abruptly he’s stopped washing his hands to stare at Oscar through the mirror. “You’re not your father. You’ll get out of here.” 

He swallows. Can’t find words, but feels like something’s been lodged in the dark place hollowed out below his heart. He wants to reply, to say something meaningful to the farm boy, but he knows if he does he’ll cry. He might cry anyways, but not while Oscar is standing there staring with those wide, innocent eyes. They have a depth to them that doesn’t make sense, belying his age and adding weight to his words. Whitley believes him. 

Their scrolls buzz almost at the same time. Oscar pulls his out swiftly, and Whitley sees the mirror image of a message through the transparent screen. Something about the heat. Something about hunters. Something about his father.

Oscar looks up, lines of worry tracing across his face. “I’m sorry. I have to go.” He shoves the scroll back into his pocket hurriedly, hands reaching back behind him, as if checking that something is still there. Face softening just barely, he turns to leave.

“It’s not true,” Whitley says quietly, is all he can think to say. The silent tension, the momentary comfort has been broken. Something beyond both of them is happening, invading the quiet sanctity of their surroundings, locking shut the lid over deeper emotions, a shallow breathlessness left behind. Oscar twists a glance over his shoulder. “I don’t hate you.”

Oscar smiles. His eyes say something like, _that’s enough. That will do._ He runs out the door without another look back. 

* * *

Whitley wraps himself around his legs, hoping that if everything is close enough, small enough, he’ll be able to disappear entirely. That the sound of his father’s yelling won’t reach him, wherever he ends up. Maybe somewhere with the farm boy, with gentle eyes and the quiet affirmation that his pitiful attempts at breaking himself out of the cage in his head isn’t all in vain. That there’s a key to the lock, that there’s something worth finding on the outside. Something beyond the bitter white walls of this place, the frozen gazes of his family. 

A field of green grass, stunning and imperfect, so different from the manicured lawns of the Schnee mansion. Wildflowers and dandelions, stumps of trees, piles of wood by a warm brown farmhouse. A red wheelbarrow still damp from the morning, its wheels caked in mud.The simple peace of routine, of not worrying about the public eye, the company, the posturing to avoid a scolding or worse. 

Whitley’s arms grip tighter, sure to leave bruises. Outside, his father is shoved inside of a police car, his shouting finally, blessedly becoming muffled, unintelligible. The poison no longer dangerous, the words losing power. His mother holds herself in the moments before shattering, sober for this. He thinks he understands. It doesn’t change how much it hurts. 

He sees her turning, and before he can process the motion fully he is staggering to his feet. He doesn't want to see her eyes, doesn’t want to see what they hold. He doesn’t want to see the pain. He is scared to see relief. Most of all he knows there will be clarity, clarity like how she stared at Winter dressed smartly in her Atlesian military uniform, wonderingly, as if she didn’t quite believe her eldest was about to escape. How she looked when she waved Weiss off, wishing her well on her quest to become a huntress. Telling her to never return if she can help it, the conviction of her words mirrored in her sharp eyes. She had never looked at him like that. This will not be the moment. 

He runs. 

* * *

He tries to think. To remember. Endless drilling, intensive classes, the best tutors money could buy. Well educated, intelligent, top of his class. His memory was perfect, he knew it. He forced it to be, viciously shoving any piece of information he could into his mind, holding it as long as he could, to impress his instructors, his father. Sleepless nights won him the title of best student, won him sparkling recommendations and gushing to his parents. He had hoped that would make his father happy. Make his mother happy. It was what he knew they wanted. They never said anything. Nothing he could remember, at least. There was only the feeling of his father’s hand as it wrapped around his shoulder, the way he always said that Schnees excel in anything they do, but they must always strive to be better. The best is never good enough. 

His memory is perfect. But he cannot remember if he has ever had a friend. It has to be obvious, he thinks, desperately. People must know, somehow, that they are friends with someone else. That they have won an important place in someone else’s life, that they have spent enough time together that they can rely on one another. There must be a line that he can never seem to find, a sign in a language he can’t read that signals that it is safe enough to open up, to be your true self with another person. 

Whitley isn’t sure he has a true self. There’s never been anything else but the framework of the perfect son stretched over his personality. He knows that he has studied for so long and so hard for years, but he cannot remember why, or the action of doing so, what the pages felt like as they turned under his hands, how it felt to flawlessly answer every question that came his way, reciting verbatim the knowledge he had memorized. He is a disconnected collection of academic knowledge and the facts of himself, a dark block in his mind keeping him from the memories of his life. He is Whitley Schnee, of that he is certain, but he has never known who that is, and he thinks he is supposed to.

He has seen his peers, the way they have lights in their eyes, visions and goals and a future they have paved and decided for themselves. They know who they are, they must. To decide all that, to suss out what it is they really want, disconnect it from the desire to break themselves into an image of their parents. He knows he is not liked, not really. Not past his utility, his connections. All from wealthy families, his classmates know what it means to make connections, to prioritize business over interpersonal relations. But they still do not like him. They do not sit with him in the dining halls. They do not ask where his bruises come from. They do not care. 

He has never known his parents to be anything but who they are. They are not anyone you could find comfort in. Whitley draws into himself, wedged between bookcases. The farm boy told him to talk to someone. To find a lifeline. He doesn’t know how to do that when everyone and everything is so far away. When the only things that he can make himself care about are the priorities his parents have put on him, the education and the business, the coldness and the backstabbing. 

He hears the help looking for him, most likely to tell him that his mother wants to talk to him. He hopes they don’t find him, that he can stay here forever, becoming decoration and nothing else, like he’s supposed to be. 

He doesn’t think he could make it out of here. Or that he would survive if he did, but maybe dying out there would be better than living in here.

* * *

He escapes in the confusion and panic of an incoming invasion. He doesn’t know as much about grimm as he knows about how to avoid his father's anger, but he knows he needs something to fight with. There are wickedly sharp knives in the kitchen. He holds one, contemplating. There are portraits around the mansion, elegant whitewashed dead faces holding their own weapons expertly in their hands. His hand is shaking as he flicks a finger over the gleaming edge of the blade. There are guns in the mansion. His mother might be there, locked in the panic room, rifle pointed at the door. A knife will have to do. 

The streets are cracked, caved in, people rushing past. Shopfronts are lucky to be shattered, as most have crumbled. The sky is filled with black wings and red eyes. The screams are even distant now, as he’s too close to the epicenter, where the greatest fear manifested itself. Everyone smart enough to get out has vanished. Even the screams are only distant and occasional. Whitley finds that he has no idea what he is supposed to do now. The ground shakes, and he barely catches himself on a fallen light post as an ear shattering scream pierces through the air. 

It feels surreal, as he turns to stare at the winged monster staring straight through him with bloody eyes. He cannot be the boy about to be eaten by a creature of grimm. He is not the boy standing, shaking, clutching the knife’s handle with two hands and wondering what he thought it would do against real, actual monsters. He is somewhere at home, only relatively safe, reading a news feed about some idiotic child who thought he was brave enough to die. 

The creature charges. He knows he will never be able to move fast enough to get out of the way, knows he doesn’t have the physical experience to defend himself. He holds the knife and closes his eyes. Imagines a peaceful, grassy field. Thinks of hard labor, dirt under nails, a body beside him, laughing quietly. Eyes too old for his face, but still kind. 

There’s no pain, and he doesn’t scream. He’s even stopped shaking, muscles locked tight. There’s a flash of green that reaches his eyes even behind his eyelids, the dying wail that sounds like it’s coming from inside of a long, dark tunnel. He feels something like ash, or maybe dust, blow towards his face. 

He opens his eyes, barely. Sees a figure standing just a few feet away. He thinks that it must be Oscar, because it looks like Oscar. The figure has the same build, the same clothes, the same soft hair. But it cannot be Oscar, because its eyes glow a honey gold, casting its face in strange abstract shadows. 

He feels his legs give out from under him, and someone slurs, “I could have taken it,” before blackness envelops him.


End file.
